Clean energy claim: Aluminum in your car tank

A Purdue University engineer and National Medal of Technology winner says he's ready and able to start a revolution in clean energy.

Professor Jerry Woodall and students have invented a way to use an aluminum alloy to extract hydrogen from water — a process that he thinks could replace gasoline as well as its pollutants and emissions tied to global warming.

But Woodall says there's one big hitch: "Egos" at the U.S. Department of Energy, a key funding source for energy research, "are holding up the revolution."

Woodall says the method makes it unnecessary to store or transport hydrogen — two major challenges in creating a hydrogen economy.

"The hydrogen is generated on demand, so you only produce as much as you need when you need it," he said in a statement released by Purdue this week.

So instead of having to fill up at a station, hydrogen would be made inside vehicles in tanks about the same size as today's gasoline tanks. An internal reaction in those tanks would create hydrogen from water and 350 pounds worth of special pellets.

"No extra room would be needed," Woodall said, "and the added weight would be the equivalent of an extra passenger, albeit a pretty large extra passenger."

The hydrogen would then power an internal combustion engine or a fuel cell stack.

"It's a simple matter to convert ordinary internal combustion engines to run on hydrogen," Woodall said. "All you have to do is replace the gasoline fuel injector with a hydrogen injector."

How it works
Here's how it all happens: Hydrogen is generated spontaneously when water is added to pellets of the alloy, which is made of aluminum and a metal called gallium.

"When water is added to the pellets, the aluminum in the solid alloy reacts because it has a strong attraction to the oxygen in the water," Woodall said. "No toxic fumes are produced."

This reaction splits the oxygen and hydrogen contained in water, releasing hydrogen in the process.

An electrical and computer engineering professor, Woodall first discovered the basic process while working as a researcher in the semiconductor industry in 1967.

"I was cleaning a crucible containing liquid alloys of gallium and aluminum," Woodall said. "When I added water to this alloy — talk about a discovery — there was a violent poof. I went to my office and worked out the reaction in a couple of hours to figure out what had happened. When aluminum atoms in the liquid alloy come into contact with water, they react, splitting the water and producing hydrogen and aluminum oxide."

That research led to advances in cell phones, solar cells, optical-fiber communications and light-emitting diodes, and earned Woodall the 2001 National Medal of Technology from President Bush.

In recent years, Woodall built a team of Purdue electrical, mechanical, chemical and aeronautical engineering students to fine-tune the process.

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